Byzantium Sacred Sites Culture Victory Guide (T170 pangaea all standard)

Just had my third attempt on Immortal.

First attempt: Byzantium. Missed out on all the faith buildings.
Second attempt: Ethiopia. Got two Pagodas and monasteries, but no sacred sites.
Third attempt: Got only Pagodas, though I have sacred sites. I can only get 10 cities, so I don't know if I will be able to get a CV with just Pagodas. Its 20 tourism.

I think I'll give up on trying this on immortal. I seem to try so hard only to fail in either religion or culture (not getting to reformation in time).

I've failed a few times as well On immortal and failed each time. I really think the best way to do it is to use Byzantium, steal workers and build Stonehedge and beeline NC and the the Hague Sophia. The constraint in my mind is getting your enhancement and getting all three

So would this be some kind of (RNG) challenge to win a cultural victory on immortal?

in case you missed it, I posted immortal quick t120 screenshot long ago. Doing this at immortal is much harder but doable, especially if you play OP civs like poland or shoshone.

for immortal, you usually need to build stonehenge instead of pyramid. If you start early stonehenge is 90%+ guaranteed.

FrostK said:

It is possible on deity for sure. You should not take Byzantia until you want to restart game 1000 times. Just cause on deity AI found religions very fast. Even Maya can not take fast pantheon. And generally you need to enhance before third religion (first should be yours) is founded, otherwise you risk to miss second building.
You need desert start and a lot of space. I manged to win in 220 turns by Ethiopia, used great musicians for most cultural civ. End up with 40 cities.
Anyway I made several important mistakes, so I believe it can be done under 200 turns.

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I did deity sub 200 with egypt - UB really helps to keep happiness positive. Yet, I did some war to get more room to expo so it was not a 'pure' ICS game.

Picked Ethiopia again and was able to get pagodas and cathedrals with Sacred Sites, but I used Tradition to do so with no wonder. Of course this meant that I only have 8 cities without room to expand. Two of those are in the snow. Also got tithe and religious texts, so I have some cash flow.

I'm sticking to the game though and trying for CV even though it will come much later, if at all. It's turn 207 and I have 36 culture.

glory7 said:

in case you missed it, I posted immortal quick t120 screenshot long ago. Doing this at immortal is much harder but doable, especially if you play OP civs like poland or shoshone.

for immortal, you usually need to build stonehenge instead of pyramid. If you start early stonehenge is 90%+ guaranteed.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll check it out. I agree that on immortal Pyramids is not optimal, but I think that if you play as a religious civ, like Ethiopia, you'd be better going with the Oracle since getting to Reformation in time is tough. I could have cotten Oracle in my current game but I delayed by two turns and missed it by just 1. If I had gotten it, my tourism would have kicked in 15 turns sooner.

I can't seem to do it, going to give it a go tonight with a cooked start. I normally don't like searching for starts but a faith pantheon is mandatory I think. I've tried about 4 times but I always seem to miss my religious building on enhancement or miss sacred sites on reformation.

I'm trying to work off this to build out into a more normal paced, perhaps less risky strategy to parlay faith into a fast cultural victory. This strategy is great and seems to work reasonably well on Emperor, but in 3-4 tries I only managed to hit it once. The other times, runaways, excessive slowdown from barbarians/warmongers, etc. kept me from hitting the early tourism needed to head off a runaway cultural civ, and of course you can lose sacred sites to a religious civ with little recourse. It's also completely inflexible and going too slow or missing sacred sites is an auto-loss.

That said, cranking out faith buildings seems like it has a good natural synergy with a liberty opener, and I'm currently playing through a (Prince) game to test Byzantium + sacred sites + 3 faith buildings with a slower strategy, the goal being to win a cultural victory later in the game, but more consistently. Currently around turn 170 I'm influential over 2 civs, close with another, with 6 cities and 3 faith buildings in all of them, producing 120 fpt.

I'm weighing spamming settlers and purchasing faith buildings until happiness is back to zero, versus playing the long game and simply pressing my tourism advantage through more typical means. There is reasonable synergy, again, to waiting to expand until this point as happiness shouldn't be a problem with 3 faith purchased happiness buildings available in just 2-3 turns. Faith seems to snowball like no other resource, as it is the only one that can be cheaply funneled into happiness/culture buildings that ALSO produce more faith. Though I assumed I would go down Liberty after piety, I actually finished tradition instead so that I could buy great engineers with faith to make sure I get critical tourism wonders later on...

It's a shame though that there is really nothing to do to push for a cultural victory in this middle game, after the natural decline in sacred sites' value when you have finished a wide empire, but before the availability of later game tourism.

T187 Byzantium

T187 immortal Byzantium got all three faith builds had about 10 coties

Has anyone tried this with Rome? I.e. faster Shrines, Monuments and Temples!

Ribannah said:

Has anyone tried this with Rome? I.e. faster Shrines, Monuments and Temples!

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I suppose that might work but shrines and temples build in half the time anyway so I can't see a dramatic hammer savings

If you're keeping outlying cities at 1 pop (or 2, 3 if you get Pagodas), aren't the Songhai better than Egypt? Burial Tomb happiness isn't doing anything in a 1 pop city that has some religious buildings, but Mud Temples give +2 culture so you can reach Reformation faster (the primary fail point of this strategy is not getting Sacred Sites).

15% Wonder Construction vs bonus 50 gold from Barbarian Camps is hard to call, but Mud Temples are better than Tombs.

JustinianIV said:

Picked Ethiopia again and was able to get pagodas and cathedrals with Sacred Sites, but I used Tradition to do so with no wonder. Of course this meant that I only have 8 cities without room to expand. Two of those are in the snow. Also got tithe and religious texts, so I have some cash flow.

I'm sticking to the game though and trying for CV even though it will come much later, if at all. It's turn 207 and I have 36 culture.



Thanks, I'll check it out. I agree that on immortal Pyramids is not optimal, but I think that if you play as a religious civ, like Ethiopia, you'd be better going with the Oracle since getting to Reformation in time is tough. I could have cotten Oracle in my current game but I delayed by two turns and missed it by just 1. If I had gotten it, my tourism would have kicked in 15 turns sooner.

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Oracle is almost a must - it does not matter you get stonehenge or pyramid or whatever -you need to get oracle. If you miss it, it would delay your victory turn at least by 10. You can still win easily at emperor level but it's very annoying. For immortal or above, losing oracle means that it's hard to win with this strategy.

Egypt tomb allows size 2 cities without religious buildings giving only 4 unhappiness but songhai saves you 2 gold and gives 2 culture which is great. Nice civ songhai too.
I think that to try this on inmortal you should go piety first, I'll give it a try with ethiopia.

-_- isn't this considered rather cheese-y? XD
(and as far as I know if Pacal is in the game in immortal then there's no way it's going to work... his culture is insane, and as far as I know he grabs all the religious wonders and theres little you can do about it)
(you never thought it would fail if somehow your cities get converted by religious pressure? because you spend faith on monasteries and the like)

I assume with this strategy you have to play without barbarians? Or i'm too stupid and its implied you have to adapt build order? Since you cant spam settlers before you get at least 2 archers. Or how you defend and try to chop forest when there are 3 barb warriors surround you capitol?

The whole idea is great. Even if it is sad that there is not many alternatives.
However it is not bullet proof. If there is another civ more focused on converting others then you may find yourself constantly fighting with misionaries which may be very annoying. Also there is quite a lot of gamble, you need to grab both sacred buildings, and reformacion belief. And grab the land to have where to build the stuff. So many variables.
Nevertheless to have some alternative, and it is also fun when mixed with normal aproach. Also Piety itself isnt so great when it comes to founding religion (or spaming cities) some extra source of fait, either from perks or map. (gamble gamble)

Note: barbarians do not prevent it, you should be able to at least escort the settlers, however i havent tried with raging barbarians.

Sadato said:

Egypt tomb allows size 2 cities without religious buildings giving only 4 unhappiness but songhai saves you 2 gold and gives 2 culture which is great. Nice civ songhai too.
I think that to try this on inmortal you should go piety first, I'll give it a try with ethiopia.

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I think on higher difficulties it has more to do with good relative-position start rng and landmass width than anything else. Going piety off the bat is probably the only safe way to get sacred sites and even then you somewhat rely on good faith from pantheon to purchase pagodas/mosques/monasteries for the culture.

People might just want to use large or huge maps or even just reduce the number of AIs from 7 to 5 for a standard size map and probably feel it to be quite easy. Both culture and tourism scale linearly with horizontal growth but in an ICS mindset, the human player will take better advantage of the spare room than the AI.

my friend sent me a really nice map to apply this tactic for the deity level. So I gave it a try. Deity/Standard speed/large size/raging barbs. I think he also turned on policy saving (and/or promo saving, I don't know), but I haven't used it.

For the 1st play, ethi enhanced right before I do and caught the last religion building (monastery). I kept playing to test out how things work out with only 1 building (I had mosque) - it became a domination game. I had to take lots of cities (no place to settle...) to annex and buy buildings and take some great works. Domination game was very easy too - I bribed Zulu to fight against everyone and later liberated some cities with Xbows/cannons. I hit dynamite before t155 and it was over.

Now the 2nd play. I did not use map knowledge (at least tried not to) and whenever I face a situation that I think I faced similar one during the 1st play, I did make the decision from the 1st play so that I could compare two games. In this game, ethi did not choose the last remaining building (again, monastery) and I could get it. I also got oracle and with culture CS allies (barb quests, thanks to raging barbs) I got reformation before t85. At this point, it was basically won.

I built enough CB/Xbows to defend and prevent war and made lots of expos. With liberty finisher GM, I just gave one of my crap city near cap to the culture leader so that GM did not need to travel far.

After two plays, I feel that this tactic could be successful at deity (and immortal), if you have faith NW and faith pantheon. (I had +6f NW and gem +2faith pantheon.) However, this does not happen with high probability and even in such case, if there are religion loving AIs it is very possible that they go full piety earlier than you and get sacred sites. And/or you may miss religion buildings. But if you can get sacred sites and 2 religion buildings, you can finish at a ridiculous turn.